Chinese supercomputer leapfrogs the rest of the world to top the HPC charts

For decades now the USA has held the number one spot as home to the world’s most powerful supercomputers. But now, maybe predictably, that run has ended. A supercomputer in China now outranks its US counterparts as the world’s most powerful. It is the first time since 2017 that a Chinese computer has topped a list sometimes viewed as a measure of a nation’s technological prowess.

The LineShine computer in Shenzhen displaced top-ranked US computer El Capitan in the Top500 rankings released on Tuesday. It was LineShine’s debut on the list.

China’s LineShine differs from other high-performance computers in that it runs entirely on conventional computer chips (CPUs), instead of the Graphics Processor Units (GPUs), commonly used for Artificial Intelligence (AI) specific supercomputers. It requires about 42.2 megawatts of electricity to operate, according to the list.

Supercomputers, which are more than 1,000 times faster than a regular computer, can be used to hunt for medical breakthroughs, model climate systems, simulate nuclear explosions, predict human behaviour and perform virtual weapons testing.

The Future and Deep Future of AI 2040, a keynote by futurist Matthew Griffin

Scientists involved in the Top500 project said LineShine at China’s National Supercomputing Center achieved 2.198 exaflops, meaning it can perform more than 2 quintillion calculations per second.

El Capitan, at the US government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, now ranks second, ahead of two other US supercomputers at national laboratories in Tennessee and Illinois.

Dropping to fifth place is the Jupiter supercomputer in Germany. The five are the only publicly verified Exascale computers in the world. Other countries with machines in the top 10 include Italy, Switzerland and Japan.

The UK has 11 machines in the list of 500. The University of Bristol’s Isambard-AI is highest ranked of that group at 11, down two places since the last ranking. Isambard-AI, fitted with 5,400 Nvidia “superchips”, sits inside a black metal cage topped with razor wire. Western Australia’s Setonix – ranked 86th – is the best performing of the four machines located in Australia.

Last year the EU revealed a €20bn (£17bn) plan to build sites equipped with vast supercomputers to develop the next generation of AI models, as Europe attempts to catch leaders in the US and China.

The AI “gigafactories” will target “moonshot” innovations in areas such as healthcare, biotech, industry, robotics and scientific discovery.

The best-performing AI factories have supercomputers equipped with up to 25,000 advanced AI processors, but a gigafactory would exceed 100,000 AI processors, the EU strategy document said.

These power-hungry facilities, which can require huge amounts of water for cooling, should run “as much as possible” on a green energy supply, an EU official said, with plans for “recycling” water if it was used.